Deals discover app Little acquires Stylofie

With this acquisition, the startup aims to strengthen its presence in the beauty and wellness segment

I love a good story, be it through advertisements, movies or an entrepreneur who dared to think differently. I believe in bringing in fresh perspectives -- to a corporate profile or a Facebook post -- like new wine in an even newer bottle. I graduated with a journalism degree from the Xavier Institute of Communications. My weekend rituals involve watching Bollywood movies and reading up on style trends.

Bengaluru-based online-to-offline (O2O) deals discovery app, Little on Thursday announced the acquisition of Stylofie, a marketplace for salons and spas. This is the startup’s second acquisition, the first being Chandigarh-based deals marketplace Trideal in October 2015.

Founded in 2015 by Manish Chopra and Satish Mani, who also founded online fashion brand Zovi, Little is present in 15 cities in India and offers close to 50,000 deals across categories like food and beverages, movies and health and wellness from 25,000 merchants. To date, it has raised $50 million from Paytm, SAIF Partners, GIC Singapore and others.

“We are always looking to increase market share by adding new customers and merchants to our Little app platform. Stylofie had a great marketplace model that will be a perfect fit for us. We are excited to have Saurav [Dey, co-founder of Stylofie] and the rest of the Stylofie family on board as we join forces to consolidate our leadership position in this space,” says Manish Chopra, CEO and co-founder, Little.

Through this mixed cash-equity deal, Little hopes to strengthen its presence in the beauty and wellness segment. It will get access to over 50,000 registered visitors and 1,000 merchants on the Stylofie platform. Gurugram-based Stylofie, founded by Dey, Prateek Agarwal and Balaji Srinivasan allows users to book, compare and rate their favourite salon and spas in Benglauru, Delhi and Gurugram. They also provide merchants with insights and data into their daily operations. Dey will be joining the Little team while the latter two will be exiting to explore other opportunities.

“With Stylofie, we were able to build a marketplace model which drove affordability for consumers and increased capacity utilisation for our merchants. [With Little], we saw an opportunity to build India’s largest marketplace for salons and spas,” says Dey.